Fortunately not everyone has such a cavalier attitude towards data collection especially when such data is used to declare pandemic and shut down economies, lockdown daily life and have de facto haouse arrest for millions. And all the while "we are waiting for vaccine....."
Secondly, that "simple act" of declaring 4k deaths as presumed Covid-19 after the fact raises a lot of questions. Serious ones. Like for example, if indeed these deaths were/are "excess deaths" (meaning they surpass average number of expected deaths with that period), how come no one noticed? And don't tell me 4k excess deaths in NY would not be noticed or invite a lot of question and worry from State government, hospitals and federal governments and hosts of other government agencies. Another important question is, since these 4k deaths didn't happen within an hour or a day, what was recorded before as the cause? And why change from that to Covid-19?
And please don't give us that "if someone exhibit Covid-19 symptoms then it is reasonable to register such a death as a result of Covid-19..." Because a host of other diseases and conditions have similar symptoms or combination of those symptoms. Check symptoms for Zinc deficiency and compare them with what they say are Covid-19 synptoms. Or even flu symptoms.
For the UK, I leave you with a longer quotation by Prof. John Lee a recently retired professor of pathology and a former NHS consultant pathologist.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19-is-not-as-clear-as-we-thinkBut there’s another, potentially even more serious problem: the way that deaths are recorded. If someone dies of a respiratory infection in the UK, the specific cause of the infection is not usually recorded, unless the illness is a rare ‘notifiable disease’. So the vast majority of respiratory deaths in the UK are recorded as bronchopneumonia, pneumonia, old age or a similar designation. We don’t really test for flu, or other seasonal infections. If the patient has, say, cancer, motor neurone disease or another serious disease, this will be recorded as the cause of death, even if the final illness was a respiratory infection. This means UK certifications normally under-record deaths due to respiratory infections.
Now look at what has happened since the emergence of Covid-19. The list of notifiable diseases has been updated. This list — as well as containing smallpox (which has been extinct for many years) and conditions such as anthrax, brucellosis, plague and rabies (which most UK doctors will never see in their entire careers) — has now been amended to include Covid-19. But not flu. That means every positive test for Covid-19 must be notified, in a way that it just would not be for flu or most other infections.
In the current climate, anyone with a positive test for Covid-19 will certainly be known to clinical staff looking after them: if any of these patients dies, staff will have to record the Covid-19 designation on the death certificate — contrary to usual practice for most infections of this kind. There is a big difference between Covid-19 causing death, and Covid-19 being found in someone who died of other causes. Making Covid-19 notifiable might give the appearance of it causing increasing numbers of deaths, whether this is true or not. It might appear far more of a killer than flu, simply because of the way deaths are recorded.
Isn’t it obvious not everyone who dies is tested? If a patient is exhibiting Covid-19 symptoms and they perish it seems sensible to presume they died of it,and to carry out contact tracing and all. Given the limited resources(testing kits) it seems wasteful testing dead bodies for purposes of record keeping and nothing else.
Wuhan revised their dead upwards and I’m reading UK nursing home deaths may be 7K and not 1400 as reported.
Nobody really gains in reporting these deaths unless you can show me how